[Blarg]

I think a lot of symbolism is crap too. Especially when it's the supposedly important and telling repetition of minor details that really doesn't amount to much more than tedious cleverness. But it's vital to some works in deeper ways, and can set up resonances in a story that make it much richer. Especially if you've read much of the bible or much Shakespeare, you may find a seemingly innocuous or even indecipherable story suddenly comes to life when you catch how it is playing off of a classic, maybe doing a little twist on it or exploring it in a different way.

I'd very strongly suggest reading Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces to anyone with an interest in literature, or just stories in general, whether religious ones, high-falutin' great classics, or good ole yarns told around the campfire while eating beans and lifting a leg to let a fart out sideways. That book gets at the mythic structural underpinning of even very simple stories, and does a very interesting job of showing how even greatly differing religious traditions have many key themes in common, because they are the key themes to human existence. It's enlightening and for me at least served as a wonderful skeleton key to understanding a lot of symbolism and seeing how and why it can actually work when done right. I wished I had it when I was a kid writing essays in high school and not really understanding what that symbolism crap was about either.

Regarding King specifically, his short stories tend to be pretty tight and great fun. His novels are kind of all over the place in how well they are written, quite apart from how scary they are and somewhat apart from how fun they are, but I admit to only reading like the first ten. Salem's Lot was easily his best among the ones I read. The Shining was wonderful in many places, but the first 50 or 60 pages were dull and rambling, and I've met many people who have put the book down early because of that. I've encouraged them to pick it up again because I felt the same way and still loved the rest of the book, and have found anyone who did so to agree with me and say thanks, I'd never have bothered otherwise.

King might as well have invented the sprawling book. Others, like Clive Barker, have stated that they noted King's success with sprawl and that the public often likes it, and so began writing novels the size of refrigerators after being known for quick, tight, imaginatively vicious little short stories. It's a style that is almost everywhere in light fiction these days, a welcome exception being mysteries. In King, a good indication that he doesn't know where he is going is when he starts yakking up very cornpone characters endlessly, as if they had something to say worth listening to, and following them around on their non-adventures. He gives a sense of place doing this, but it is not necessarily an interesting place, one with interesting people, or one where anything is going to happen that couldn't have happened 25 pages -- or 250 pages -- earlier. I'd recommend his early short stories to everyone, but am not too confident in recommending his long stuff to people.